Nabila Alibhai: Quartz Africa Innovators 2018

This is the fourth edition of the Quartz Africa Innovators, our annual series identifying some of the most ambitious and imaginative minds on the continent. The 30 movers and thinkers on this list range across fields from the arts and science to technology and entrepreneurship and beyond.

@NabilaAlibhai- Public spaces consultantKenya

How do we transform urban centers into pluralistic, safe, healthy public spaces, and responsibility for our shared spaces? In an increasingly divided world, can physical spaces be used to unite different communities? Nabila Alibhai’s work revolves around questions like these.

The founder of Kenya-based cultural lab inCOMMONS, Alibhai has worked on projects in Tanzania, Rwanda, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and the US. She’s conducted civic leadership exercises with students, mapped neighborhoods to make them cleaner and greener, and promoted eco-tourism. In 2016, the inCOMMONS project Color in Faith saw Christian and Muslim volunteers in Kenya paint houses of worship an “optimistic yellow” to celebrate unity in diversity.

Projects like these, Alibhai says, show people they have more in common than they think. “We are using co-created art to bring hope, imagine new realities, facilitate communication and dialogue, and provide connection and catharsis,” she says.

Quote

These restored gardens are the first chahar-bagh, or four-part paradise garden to surround a Mughal tomb on the sub-continent. Built nearly a century before the Taj Mahal, the Tomb and its gardens were an expression of the love and respect borne towards the Emperor Humayun by his son, Akbar and widow, Haji Begum. The chahar-bagh was more than a pleasure garden. In the discipline and order of its landscaped geometry, its octagonal or rectangular pools, its selection of favourite plants and trees, it was an attempt to create transcendent perfection – a glimpse of paradise on earth.

The hues and scents of these gardens, the varied sources of the design elements and of the chosen construction materials, make this monument an important reminder of the power and elegance of diversity, while the sentiments that moved its patrons, united them in a shared virtue.

— Excerpt: His Highness the Aga Khan at the ceremony to inaugurate the restored Humayun’s Tomb gardens. New Delhi, India. 15 April 2003 https://the.ismaili/speeches